Monday, February 27, 2012

Regarding the issue of how likely it is that the universe is spontaneously fine tuned to support life:"Other Values for Physical Constants May Not Be Physically Possible""Other Values for Physical Constants May Be Highly Improbable""There May Be an Ensemble of Other Worlds"according to Theodore Drange Professor Emeritus at West Virginia University, where he taught philosophy from 1966 to 2001.

Regarding abiogenesis: "At the moment, since we have no idea how probable life is, it's virtually impossible to assign any meaningful probabilities to any of the steps to life" according to Ian Musgrave who is a senior lecturer for medical research at the University of Adelaide.

Regarding evolution: "In particular, the extremely small probability of the spontaneous emergence of intelligent life, as calculated (usually not quite correctly) by the opponents of the hypothesis of life’s spontaneous emergence, by no means indicates that the spontaneous emergence of life must be ruled out." according to Mark Perakh professor emeritus of Mathematics and statistical mechanics at California State University, Fullerton.

Other estimates are more pessimistic:

The probability of an environment occurring where life could exist among all the possible results of the Big Bang is on the order of one in 10^123 according to Roger Penrose, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.” according to Ilya Prigogine chemist and Nobel Laureate.

"The probability of human evolution is about: 10^(‑100x 3000) or 10^‑300,000." according to R. Webster Kehr B.S. Mathematics, BYU.

In other words, it seems to be very unlikely, if not impossibly unlikely, that we or any type of comparably complex living things could exist unless God created the universe and created life.

The atheistic response to this decisive refutation is as follows: God's origin would be even more improbable than the origin of life and the universe. Therefore belief in God resolves nothing.

This response is nonsense since God is eternal. For their argument to be valid, atheists would have to prove that an eternal Creator cannot exist, however of course they can't.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

In his book The Illusion of Conscious Will, Daniel M. Wegner a professor of psychology at Harvard University, claims that our sense of conscious agency is ALWAYS imaginary. In other words we are actually robots or zombies who only imagine ourselves to have free will.

Richard Dawkins, the chief atheist propagandist, has likewise declared that living things possess a very successful "Illusion of Design", so successful that to this day most Americans "stubbornly" refuse to believe it is an illusion.

So according to atheists, we live actually in a strange magical world where nothing is what it clearly seems to be.

How convenient for psychopathic hedonists. The idea that God created us, that we have a soul, that there may be an unavoidable reward or punishment in the afterlife, that we even have any free will and moral responsibility to begin with are all illusions. Whatever the atheist does he can claim that his hormones, brain chemistry and bad parents made him do it and so long as he can avoid going to jail (not difficult if you have a little luck and/or a good lawyer) he has nothing to worry about.

I personally believe that, barring very strong evidence to the contrary, things are what they appear to be. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Surprisingly the north African desert scorpion, Androctonus australis, unlike other desert animals, does not dig burrows. It is a resistant to sand storms. When the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, this scorpion is able to survive without apparent damage.

Recently, Dr Han Zhiwu of Jilin University, in China, and his colleagues found that Androctonus armor is covered with dome-shaped granules that are 10 microns high and between 25 and 80 microns across. The granules disturb the air flow near the scorpion's surface in ways that appeared to be reducing the erosion rate. Their computer model suggested that if scorpion exoskeletons were smooth, they would experience almost twice the erosion rate that they actually do.

Aircraft engines and helicopter rotor-blades are constantly abraded by atmospheric dust, and a way of slowing down this abrasion would be welcome.

The research team placed samples of steel in a wind tunnel and fired grains of sand at them using compressed air. One piece of steel was smooth, but the others had grooves of different heights, widths and separations, inspired by scorpion exoskeleton, etched onto their surfaces. Each sample was exposed to the lab-generated sandstorm for five minutes and then weighed to find out how badly it had been eroded.

The result was that the pattern most resembling scorpion armor proved best able to withstand the assault. The lesson for aircraft makers, Dr Han suggests, is that a little surface irregularity might help to prolong the active lives of planes and helicopters, as well as those of scorpions.

From this we see another example of remarkable divine wisdom in nature. Human engineers are able to learn from humble little bugs.

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Tomorrow is known in the Talmud as the New Year of Trees, on which it is customary to eat fruit. Therefore this is an appropriate time to note God's gift of the orange.

What a masterpiece of intelligent design! The fruit is sweet, delicious and nutritious. The peel is a beautiful wrapper, easily removed. The pits may be thrown on the ground and, in the right conditions, will each grow into a tree that will produce thousands of additional oranges. Imagine being able to break off part of a computer, throw it on the ground and see a computer factory grow from it.

Human breeding has improved upon the original wild citrus, however those are merely small finishing touches on a masterpiece.

To counter that this all appears to be designed, however in reality has been created by chance, is like saying I only imagine that I am a human, however I am in reality an earthworm dreaming that he is human. It is a denial of what our senses perceive bordering on madness.

About Me

I am an Orthodox Jew and I live in Rockland County, NY.
I was raised as a non-practicing Lutheran by my adopted parents and I converted to Judaism at age 16.
This blog as a rule follows the teachings of the Lithuanian rabbinical seminaries of the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, I have been very influenced by the recordings and writings of Rabbi Avigdor Miller obm.
Click for more details about me.